"Your stories are really different."

"What stories do your people tell?"

"There's the story of the founding of the town."

"Oooooh, tell me that one."

"There was a town, north and west, and it was big from having had many children in many good years, and there was not enough of the right food, and the children were eating plums and the people at the edges were eating chickens and even killing them did not make the town small enough, and so the town thought about who could be done without but do only with each other, and they thought and thought, and they tried having a group wake at night instead of during the day to see if they were all right and killed all the waterfall-mad to make it safe to try, and the night group was all right, and so they set out together in the night to find an empty place where they could start a new town, and they built houses and chicken coops and farms, and that is how our town was made."

"Well that story is so much more cheerful and murder-free than mine."

"It's the one you asked for!"

"Why did they kill people who ate plums and chickens?"

"It's a metaphor. Except maybe they also actually did."

"What's it a metaphor for?"

"Doing things they're told not to."

"So the town kills people who do things they're told not to?"

"Yeah."

"Charming."

"Huh?"

"Humans don't do that usually and it isn't a nice thing to do and I wouldn't be impressed with humans who did do it."

"Humans're different."

"Yeah. Lots of races do things that humans think are bad and - well. I think they're bad. They think I'm bad. You can't usually get very far with that."

"But I heard humans do too kill other humans for doing things they're told not to."

"Yeah. Where I'm from we kill people for treason, doing extremely dangerous magic, or crimes like murder if they're dangerous people we can't safely hold. But - that's because those are really serious and you really can't have people doing them. If we killed people for eating things they weren't supposed to eat we'd be horribly tyrannical."

"Why do you tell people not to eat things then?"

" - I mean, we might punish it, just not with death. They might have to pay a fine or they might get whipped or we might have a subtle artist make it so they can't do it again."

"What's a subtle artist?"

"People who can do subtle arts - mental stuff. Some humans just are. I don't think all races produce subtle artists so yours might just not do that."